Harun Farocki

[ENG] Harun Farocki was a filmmaker, media artist and theorist. He was born in Novy Jicin in 1944, in what is today the Czech Republic and he died in Berlin in 2014. After Farocki studied at the Deutsch Film-und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) from 1966 to 1968, he worked in film and TV productions as a freelance. Farocki started his film career in 1960s, a period of political modernism and radical avant-garde. He received international attention after Cahiers du Cinema covered him under the title of Who is Farocki? in 1975. Some have called him ‘Germany's best-known unknown filmmaker' since his works had been introduced mostly in German speaking area. Farocki's works treat a wide spectrum of subjects such as film, videotapes, multimedia installation, and so on.

Farocki has been influenced by directors like Robert Bresson, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Bertov, but also by writers like Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Günther Anders. Some considers that Farocki's films belong to the avant-garde montage cinema of Eisenstein and Vertov or New German Cinema of Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Wim Wenders. Chris Marker as well as the French Nouvelle Vague have also had an influence on his work.

Farocki's works are constant conversations with images, with image making, and with the institutions that produce these images. As he once said: “My films are made against the cinema and against television,” he maintains a critical stance toward all media capable to create images. Although most of his works are within documentary category, Farocki provides various debates rather than conventional documentary forms for objectivity.

[ENG] Harun Farocki (1944, Novy Jicin-Berlin, 2014). The work of the artist and film-maker has had a decisive influence on the history of the political film since the late 1960s. Besides over 100 productions made for television and cinema, Farocki – as long-time author and editor of the magazine Filmkritik, curator, and visiting professor in Berkeley, Harvard and Vienna – has conveyed his reflections on the relation between society, politics and the moving picture. His huge significance for the visual arts is reflected in retrospectives of his films in institutions such as Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Fundació Tàpies/Barcelona and the Tate Modern/London, as well as in solo exhibitions at MUMOK/Vienna, Jeu de Paume/Paris, Museum Ludwig/Cologne, Kunsthaus/Bregenz and more recently at MUAC/Mexico and the Hamburguer Bahnhof in Berlin. In 1997 and 2007 Farocki took part in the dOCUMENTA in Kassel, as well in the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2015). His work sets out a constant research on the conditions of production of the audiovisual image, visual resources and narratives, and the subtexts contained in the production and distribution of moving images.